The 1978 Blizzard was worse … get over it!

Posted on02/16/2010|Comments Off on The 1978 Blizzard was worse … get over it!

We have lots of snow on the ground here in southern Delaware County. According to NBC’s Jym Ganahl, we’ve received 45″ so far this winter, which is more than Cleveland has (42″). Naturally, we’re all complaining because we usually don’t have this much. We’re spoiled.

In the past 10 days since we’ve starting receiving these three storms, I’ve had a lot of viewers to an article I wrote in Jan 2008 about the 30-yr anniversary of the1978 blizzard. When you see the photos that I included in that article, you’ll see we’re not as bad now as it was then.

There were some key differences to then vs now. The main one was that cars were primarily rear-wheel drive. Volkswagen was about the only one with front-wheel drive. (We had a VW Rabbit) Jeeps had 4WD but the SUV concept hadn’t come into being yet. If you read the article, you’ll learn we lived in Marysville which is FLAT with many roads running NW-SE causing additional problems with drifting.

The National Guard was called to the city to help out. Gov Rhodes asked for further assistance from people with snow mobiles as they were the only transporation that could make it through the rural roads. We’re certainly not that bad now. We lost electricity for several days after the blizzard. Thank goodness that hasn’t happened in these recent snow storms. I don’t recall snow blowers being used then, although they could never have handled the amount of snow that we had. It was strictly backbreaking shovel work.

So, you see, it’s not so bad here. Now don’t you feel better. This is like the story your grandpa told you about walking to school … up hill … both ways.🙂